Sam Gordon Football Video Is Back with Lamer Music Due to Copyright Tangle

The viral video everyone has been talking about this week, depicting Peewee League football player Sam Gordon showing off some pretty amazing moves, is back online after an hours-long takedown on Thursday.

Sam’s father, Brent Gordon, posted the breathtaking video on Monday, which quickly amassed over two million views and became front-page news on the web and talkshow fodder on the boob tube, with Sam skyping in to morning talkshows on Thursday.

The video’s soundtrack was comprised of some pretty amazing music, but we wondered whether it was inadvertently stiff-arming musicians (including the Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction, The Germs, and The Doors, and their labels and publishers), due to the fact that the video has multiple songs in it and Google had declined to confirm to Evolver.fm earlier today that its ContentID audio fingerprinting system had figured out which copyright holders had the right to monetize the video.

Now, it’s back (watch below) — but with extra-lame, canned music that sounds like the montage in a bad television cop drama where the cops nervously shine flashlights around an abandoned warehouse.

“I had to change the music,” wrote Brent Gordon on YouTube 41 minutes ago. “If anyone has something to suggest that is in youtube’s database, make a suggestion.”

We’re pleased to see that the video is online, because that Sam Gordon is a sight to behold, with amazing moves and no small amount of moxie. But it’s a shame that the music is now so bad that we couldn’t even make it through one viewing without muting it. With the other soundtrack, I ended up watching it five times in a row.

And thus it was proven for the umpteenth time that A) The right music makes all the difference in a video, and B) Copyright, while necessary, tends to rain on parades, especially when multiple rights-holders get involved.